The Sevilla Biltmore, as it was known before the Revolution, was one of the establishments owned and run by Havana’s Mafia network. Santo Trafficante Junior had shares in it and the Cuban-Italian owner, Amletto Battisti, was the kingpin of the city’s lottery racket.

The Sevilla hotel has a rather curious layout but its public areas are very attractive. The prevailing decorative style is, as one might expect, Moorish-Andalusian, with a profusion of lustre-glazed cuerda seca tiles.

The lobby and courtyard bar are welcoming and the Hotel Mercure Sevilla is one of the only three hotels in the area with a pool (the other two are the Parque Central and the Saratoga).

The Sevilla Hotel is located just off the elegant Paseo del Prado, the public promenade which links Parque Central with the Malecon Ocean Drive, it is ideally placed for exploration of Havana’s historical centre.

The rooms are very satisfactory, but the very best part of the Mercure Sevilla, much frequented by those in the know, is its rooftop restaurant in what was once the hotel’s grand ballroom. It has wonderful views of the city and the sea, and if you can get a table next to one of the balconies you can revel in blissful ocean breezes on hot summer nights. The food is very good, owing, we assume, to the hotel’s French ownership.

Until about 2005 the hotel was known as Hotel Sofitel Sevilla.

Standard rooms at the Sevilla are delightful: light and spacious, with original Colonial furniture mixed with good replicas. The walls are rag-painted in sunny yellow, the curtains are bright and cheerful and the cool tiled floors a blessing to hot, weary sightseers’ feet. The clean, bright bathrooms are tiled in white and grey. There are excellent views over Havana from rooms on the higher floors.

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The Sevilla’s junior suites are a slight disappointment in terms of size, for although they have small sitting rooms separated from the bedrooms by a short corridor, the sizes of both sitting room and bedroom are fairly small. However the decorative style of both rooms and bathrooms is the same pretty combination of yellow and Provençal colours as that of standard rooms and there are some delightful touches of extra luxury such as the Empire style day beds upon which one feels virtually compelled to recline in a silk tunic, tossing one’s ringlets a la Meduse and requesting one’s partner to peel one another grape.

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